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St. John's University

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Brief Overview:

OHO worked with the marketing and digital team at St. John's University to address their project requirements and create a exceptional digital experience for their users. By combining UXD with new creative and a Drupal implementation, the university website redesign exceeded the expectations of the team at St. John's.

User Experience Design
St. John’s marketing and digital team knew their website’s information architecture needed a complete overhaul. Together, we focused on creating a structure that would make sense to internal and external higher education audiences, allowing them to easily find the information they needed. Using analytics data, we created new wireframes and a prototype that ensures the user experience of the new site is vastly improved and offers a clear and intuitive navigation.

Responsive Design
With the massive growth of users accessing higher ed websites using tablets and mobile devices, it was important to create a site that provides an optimized mobile experience. The new site has a responsive design that includes breakpoints for desktop, horizontal and vertical tablet screens, and mobile.

Content Management System Development
The marketing and digital team at St. John’s wanted a new content management system that would be easy-to-use and would streamline the process of posting new content. OHO built the new website in Drupal7, which offers a better security model for permissioning and revision tracking than their previous CMS. “St. John’s had the existing content management tool for over eight years and was in need of this overhaul,” said Luci Geraci, director of digital communications. “It’s a huge leap for the University that will allow it to better serve its audiences.”

In redesigning their university website, St. John’s sought to address a number of issues that were creating complexities in the day-to-day site administration and in the user experience for prospective and current students, as well as the larger University community.

-The site was relying on an eight year-old content management tool that offered a cumbersome and time consuming process for site management
-A confusing information architecture made navigating the website difficult and provided a poor user experience in which site visitors couldn’t find the information they were seeking
-The site was not addressing the needs of site visitors using mobile devices as it was built for viewing only on desktops

Key Modules, Theme, and Distribution Used:

The St. John's website uses the organic groups module as well as the feeds module.

Why these Modules, Theme, and Distribution were Chosen:

Organic groups was chosen to manage the various internal groups within the university community, allowing them each to have their own space within the website including menus, navigation, roles & permissioning, and more. The feeds module was chosen to dynamically import content from Banner.